Fabian awoke slowly, pain splitting his temples, piercing his eyeballs, his joints stiff. In panic, he looked around.
He was lying on a bunk, daylight glinting through the thatched ceiling of grass above him, his naked body covered with a rough blanket, his clothes on the floor. Near him lay Elena, still asleep, covered with a blanket. In the farthest corner of the hut, masked by shadow, he saw Francisco slumped on the floor.
Fabian got up, stumbling as the bunk seemed to buckle under him and the roof skim low over his head. Shaking, he dressed himself and made his way out into the scalding sun.
A group of natives, gesturing with animation, stood around the guide. At the sight of Fabian, they fell silent and broke ranks; like a soldier on guard, the guide greeted him with a salute.
A patch of barren clay opened before Fabian. At its center, he saw a spider, black-bodied, as large as his two hands with fingers outthrust, its hairy legs motionless, the gray belly mashed. The spider was dead, but so real in its poised menace that Fabian stepped back involuntarily.
“This is the one which killed Señor de Tormes,” the guide said.
In his stupor and revulsion Fabian assumed it was Francisco who had killed the spider, but the expression on the guide’s face alarmed him.
“Who killed what?” he asked.
“A true tarantula,” the guide said, nudging the spider with the tip of his boot. “It bit Señor de Tormes when he went out and lay down on the ground. Señora Elena, when she found out he was dead, drank a whole bottle of this”—he gestured toward what was left of the natives’ punch—“so she wouldn’t feel the pain.”
Retching as the acid liquid volleyed out of his throat, Fabian staggered back from the spider and ran into the hut.
Francisco’s body was still huddled in the dark corner. Gliding with horror, Fabian knelt by the dead man and raised the blanket that shrouded him, trying to prop up the slipping shoulders, the head that bobbed to one side. He laid one hand along the dead man’s cheek. Francisco’s face was white, the sunburned glow of the day before already erased, the eyes open, fixed somewhere beyond Fabian, one eyebrow raised, the mouth slightly agape as if in an expression of wonder.
Fabian covered the body and crossed over to Elena. In her sleep she was serene. He stroked her hand; she did not respond.
Outside, he ordered the guide to store the dead tarantula for the police and to take down the names of the natives who, by the guide’s account, had witnessed the night’s events. Then, on an impulse, Fabian drew the guide to one side, away from the villagers.
“Where were you when the tarantula bit Señor de Tormes?” he asked.
The guide hesitated. “I was—I was guarding you in the hut,” he said. “I helped to undress you and keep you down, Señor Fabian. You were—you were sleepy from the drink,” he blurted out. “Then I stayed with you so Señor de Tormes would not come at you again.”
Fabian avoided his eyes. “I don’t remember anything,” he said brusquely. “Why would Señor de Tormes want to hurt me?”
The guide smiled knowingly. “He was drunk, Señor Fabian, and he was jealous when he saw you touch his wife. He grabbed my machete and wanted to kill you.”
Unable to challenge the man’s account, Fabian shifted his inquiry. “Who was the first to see Señor de Tormes dead?” he asked.
“I was,” the guard replied. “I also told Señora Elena what happened.” He lowered his voice. “Señora Elena started to scream. She said things she shouldn’t say, ugly things.”
“What did she say?” Fabian asked.
The guide moved closer, until he was almost at Fabian’s ear. “She said that someone might have put this tarantula under Señor de Tormes.”
“But who would want to do that?” Fabian persisted.
The guide nodded in confirmation. “That’s what I asked her. But she was drunk and kept saying that it might be”—he was whispering now—“El Benefactor himself who was responsible.” He looked toward the hut sullenly. “She also accused me of it—of putting this tarantula under Señor de Tormes.”
“Why you?”
“Because I work for El Benefactor. But you, Señor Fabian, you know that I couldn’t do it.” The guide was stressing each word, carving it as though with a machete. “You know best of all, because you must remember that I was with you, guarding you all the time. All the time,” he repeated.
The roar of an approaching helicopter rushed in on them. The craft came in low over the trees and quivered to a halt in a storm of dust. Natives started to spill out of huts and bushes, running toward it, shouting with fascination and fear. The pilot stepped out, saw Fabian and explained tersely that he had had mechanical trouble the day before and had been unable to come for them after dark. He then joined Fabian and the guide in rounding up enough of the natives to carry the body of de Tormes and the sleeping Elena into the cabin.
During the short flight to Casa Bonita, Elena did not wake up. Fabian got out, and the helicopter with Elena and the guide accompanying Francisco’s body continued on to the capital.
At Casa Bonita, Fabian went directly to Falsalfa’s quarters. He impressed the secretary with the urgency of his visit and was promptly ushered into the library, where he found Falsalfa in a hammock.
“I know about the accident. The pilot radioed us from Cacata,” Falsalfa announced calmly. “What a sad case,” he added, “de Tormes at the peak of his career, a young wife—all to end with the bite of a tarantula.” He continued to sway in the hammock.
“De Tormes was murdered, Your Excellency,” Fabian said evenly. “A tarantula big enough to catch a chicken is not found in Cacata. It was the assassin’s best weapon.”
“If there was an assassin, my dear Fabian, then it had to be you,” Falsalfa said with emphasis.
“Why me?” Fabian asked boldly.
Falsalfa had stopped swaying, but the smile remained. “You were the only one with a motive to kill him—Elena.”
“That’s an ugly conjecture, Your Excellency,” Fabian replied.
“That’s an ugly crime.” Falsalfa spoke with patience. “There are witnesses: practically the whole village saw you and Elena thrashing around on the floor, right under their eyes—and under the eyes of her drunken husband.”
Fabian’s body went as hot with sweat as his voice was cold. “I don’t remember any of that,” he said. “We were all drunk—or drugged.”
“Others do remember,” Falsalfa said. “When you and Elena became too obvious, Francisco almost killed you with a machete. It was the guide, a man in my service, sober fortunately, who disarmed him and saved your life. It was he who guarded you in the hut while Francisco raved outside.” Falsalfa paused for emphasis. “And it was during the night that poor de Tormes, so tired, so drunk, and so angry, sat down in the yard—right on a tarantula taking its midnight walk there.”
“I’m certain de Tormes was murdered,” said Fabian.
The smile was no longer on Falsalfa’s lips. His hammock stopped swaying. “Would you like me to instruct my prosecutor to open a formal inquiry into the death of Francisco de Tormes?” He spoke brutally. “To tell the public what took place between you and Elena in that village of Cacata? Remember, Fabian, you are not in the United States. Here, what chance would you have for an acquittal?” Falsalfa’s composure had returned. “The fact is, neither Francisco nor the tarantula can testify, but as for the guide, the villagers—show me one man or woman who wouldn’t believe it was you who conveniently arranged that meeting between de Tormes and the tarantula.”
Fabian stood silent as the hammock resumed its rhythm. He saw himself on a witness stand in a country whose language he barely spoke, many of whose customs were alien to him. In Los Lemures, where the whim of Falsalfa was the final court, a protracted trial would be his and Elena’s downfall.
“What will happen to Señora de Tormes?” he asked abruptly, the change in his thought reflected in his voice.
Falsalfa recovered his smile. “Now, tha
t is the concern of a reasonable man,” he sighed. “All you really care about is—Elena.” He considered the matter. “She is free to do whatever she pleases. But with Francisco gone, it will be a bit harder for her. Like him, she comes from a poor family, and all de Tormes left her are debts.” He brightened at a statesmanlike solution. “Why don’t you give Elena a call and invite her to Casa Bonita for a few days?” Falsalfa looked directly at Fabian, the smile broadening. “Better yet, Fabian, why don’t I ask my personal secretary to invite her in my name? After all, Elena is the widow of my old friend, de Tormes, and the mistress of Fabian, my polo pal. What do you say?”
Fabian spoke in a voice harsh with rage. “I say, Your Excellency, that it is you who seized our trip to Cacata as the occasion to murder Francisco de Tormes. That’s why I intend to leave Los Lemures on the first plane, unless I, too, happen to be bitten by a tarantula before I get on that plane.”
Falsalfa measured Fabian with absolute certainty. “You’re just a one-on-one amateur in whatever you do, Fabian. You will always be just an amateur. Nobody in Los Lemures would bother to waste a good tarantula on you!” He gestured toward the door. The hammock was still swaying as Fabian walked out of the room.
Years later, with Falsalfa no longer in power, Fabian had been a referee at a polo meet, with some of his friends playing on each side. The game passed with a few penalty shots, but otherwise without incident. That evening Eugene Stanhope had given a dinner party for Fabian at a local cabaret. It was crowded with tourists, and Fabian’s table, at the center of the room, was the largest and most boisterous, with a dozen of his friends and polo colleagues celebrating.
Toward the end of dinner, the lights in the room dimmed. Waiters suddenly appeared, bearing aloft an embossed salver with a large ice-cream cake resting in a pool of brandy and studded with a coronet of gleaming sparklers instead of the usual birthday candles. They placed the elaborate tribute in front of Fabian, and just at the moment the headwaiter put a match to the brandy around the cake, a trio of nightclub minstrels began to serenade Fabian in thickly flavored English. His friends joined in, and tourists around the room picked up the chorus. In pleasure and surprise, Fabian rose, tilting the salver as he did so; a stream of flaming brandy slid down the front of his shirt over his jacket and trousers. He was on fire.
People applauded wildly, under the impression that the flames and Fabian were part of the entertainment. His clothes ablaze, he plunged through the room, stumbling by tables of still-cheering patrons, toward a side door opening on a verandah above the gardens. He vaulted over its railing, into the lush foliage below, blindly rolling over and over on the dewy ground to put out the flames. When, dazed, he sat up, his white suit hung in charred strips, his chest and thighs showing through the scorched cloth.
Fabian knew he had to do something about his burns at once. He went around to the back door of the cabaret to tell his friends that he was going home. A guard, looking at his disheveled state, took him for a drunk or vagrant, and rudely pushed him aside. Fabian then went to the main entrance, where couples in formal dress waited for admission to the cabaret. Once again, a guard shoved him away.
Fabian’s pain was intensifying; he slipped back through the gardens to the verandah and climbed onto it again, returning to the restaurant by the same door he had left.
As he approached the table, Fabian met with a volley of greetings and laughter from his friends and people at nearby tables. Taking his appearance as a prank, they promptly opened a magnum of champagne. With faultless aim, they doused Fabian and his burns in the sparkling fountain.
Only at the table did Fabian recall that the guard who had pushed him so rudely at the door was the same man who was once with him in Cacata, the one accused by Elena of murdering Francisco de Tormes.
In times of calm, Fabian would yield to the ministry of nature, never intrusive. It came to him in the spreading reach of a forest, the pine scent, the shallow scrub bristling the rim of a lake, the vanishing ruts of a dirt road.
In times that were febrile and hectic, the city was his nurse, always on call, faithfully dispensing to him music that would heal, a theater, pensive, compact with figures that could abort or compel his energy and thought, cinemas blinking their colors and images, the kindling of burlesque, the tease of a live sex show.
In the city, Fabian inched his VanHome along the streets, scanning the sidewalks, alleys and benches for the figure of a woman alone. He could become as aroused by a lock of hair tucked behind a girl’s ear, a certain contour of her hip or leg, as he might be by the sound of her voice, by what she said or how she responded to something in him. She would be young, tall, slender, long-legged, with large eyes and thick hair, a wide mouth, conscious of the impact her body and her walk made on men.
She had to acknowledge that he could offer no more than the union of the night, the courtship of a weekend or the intimacy of a few evenings. A man of the field and of country spaces, a man whose pattern of life was marked by abrupt change, by travel, Fabian could not permit himself to be detained too long by the solaces and distractions of a city or large town. He found himself selecting, isolating, soliciting partners as transient and avid as himself, as ready to initiate, as willing to discard.
One evening in a bar, Fabian came upon a sometime acquaintance, a well-known television sports commentator, who occasionally invited him to appear on his program to discuss various polo and horsemanship tournaments. Stephen Gordon-Smith was in his early fifties, handsome, with that virility of voice, gesture and looks, that easy directness of manner that was the hallmark of his profession. The two men were settling down for a drink when Fabian suddenly caught a glimpse, in a far corner of the bar, of two young women he had met earlier in the year. Employed by a clothing manufacturer, they were models working out of New York.
Fabian signaled them to come to the table and, when they did, he introduced them to Gordon-Smith. Both women were of Latin descent, in their early twenties, dark-haired, feminine and vivacious, with thick but well-drawn features and expressive eyes; tall and slender, they were proud of their well-defined breasts, narrow waists, and firm buttocks.
Gordon-Smith made no effort to conceal his pleasure with the girls, particularly Diana, the bolder of the two, who flirted with him more openly. Fabian noticed that his friend’s fascination with Diana was growing and when her companion got up to leave for an appointment, Fabian left too.
Three or four weeks later, after an interview about the importance of the Eugene Stanhope Polo Tournament, Gordon-Smith took Fabian to dinner and freely confided that he had been seeing Diana almost constantly and that he was considering taking a leave of absence from the network—as well as from his wife—to be able to travel and live with Diana.
Fabian, who knew how strict and conventional the major TV networks were in insisting that their most visible spokesmen—among whom Gordon-Smith had to be counted—maintain irre proachable conduct in private as well as public life, was astonished by his friend’s decision. It seemed to him especially bizarre in light of the affectionate intimacy he had observed between Gordon-Smith and Emily, his wife of over twenty years, whom Fabian had met once when she and their two daughters accompanied Gordon-Smith to an intercollegiate polo championship at an Ivy League college during Fabian’s brief tenure there as polo coach.
“How well do you know Diana?” Fabian asked cautiously.
“As well as a man ever knows a woman.” Gordon-Smith smiled expansively, with his easy air of male camaraderie.
“Has she told you much about her life?”
“There isn’t much to tell,” Gordon-Smith said. “Remember, she’s only twenty-four.”
“What was her life like?” Fabian maintained his casual tone.
“Didn’t she tell you?” Gordon-Smith shrugged. He was not much interested in Diana’s past.
“When I introduced you to her,” Fabian said, “there was no time to tell family histories.”
“Well, Diana left Ecuador—or
was it Nicaragua?—just before one of those government unheavals they had down there. That’s when her family lost everything, and she emigrated here to live with an aunt,” Gordon-Smith explained patiently. “With a little private tutoring, she picked up the language, then worked in a couple of fancy beauty parlors. Then she did something in the fashion business, as a coordinator or, you know, a model—” He broke off, happy to change the subject, and reached eagerly for his briefcase. A file of glossy, neatly mounted fashion photographs slid before Fabian’s eyes. He saw Diana glowing up at him in color and in black and white.
“Isn’t she stunning!” Gordon-Smith announced with elation, spreading out the photos.
“She is,” Fabian said. “What a beautiful woman she has become.”
Gordon-Smith leaned across the table. “I’ve had my share of women, but”—his voice dropped even lower—“no woman has ever given me what I get from her.” He laid a hand, commanding, on the photographs of Diana.
“She understands you?” Fabian suggested.
“Sexually—there’s nothing she doesn’t know about me. Nothing!” He finished his drink and reached for another that the waiter had just put before him. “We’re so open with each other, so uninhibited.”
Fabian shifted in his chair uneasily. “How long do you plan to stay with Diana?” he asked.
“Diana has made me realize what a conventional life I’ve been living all along,” Gordon-Smith said forcefully. “I want to change it now.” He stopped, the glance he threw at Fabian a challenge and also a quest for reassurance. “Even if it means breaking away from my past.”
“What about your family?” Fabian asked.
Gordon-Smith waved the question aside. “The girls are grown up,” he said. “As for Emily—” he hesitated. “Emily is as free to be herself as I am.”
“And the job?”
Gordon-Smith chafed under Fabian’s probing. “The job has nothing to do with my life—as long as I keep it private.”